Afterburn

Peace Hotel, Shanghai, China September 24, 1999

His taxi raced recklessly from the airport over an elevated highway that snaked past hundreds of enormous construction sites extending every direction into the haze. This Shanghai, new yet already retro-futuristic, forced itself brutally upward through the accumulated crust, erasing the narrow lanes of crumbling brick and pagoda roofs, penetrating the massive and ill-kept English mansions-surviving relics of Europe's short-lived triumphalism-and toppling, perhaps especially, the dreary ten-story apartment blocks erected by Mao's bureaucrats. Knocked down, bulldozed aside, trucked away. All gone-forever or soon. Finished, the fifty-story projects stood like rigid mechanical fingers, exoskeletally articulated with glass and stainless steel, aloof in their inhuman size, while the unfinished structures-great concrete bones veiled with bamboo scaffolding-entombed the foul air of the very sky itself, their shadowy honeycombed interiors flickering and flaring with welding torches as cranes lifted tilting loads, or caged construction elevators plummeted along zippered seams, while gray ant-men in yellow hard hats moved along the huge edges of man-made stone with dull vigor.

But the sight of the city did not relieve him of his misery; the sleepless flight to Hong Kong had rewired his back for constant pain, down low where all the surgery had been, and the bad air already made his chest ache. His suit lay wrinkled and damp from the heat, his mouth tasted sour, his eyes burned. The knockout pills hadn't worked-he'd been too upset about Marvin Noff's prediction of Teknetrix's demise. And he was worried about Melissa Williams, that Ellie would find out, worried by what the evening with Melissa meant, how he should think about it. Flopping around on a hotel bed with some overly attentive woman half his age was not in the plan. Not if he knew himself. But he'd given in to her so easily. Why? Was it just that he was lonely? He liked her, dammit. Was this so bad? She'd made him feel younger, if only for ten minutes. Not just younger, but alive, able to create and destroy. Maybe it was the sex that had hurt his back so much. Probably. Definitely. But it had been worth it. He wondered if she'd enjoyed it. Emotionally, he would guess. Maybe she'd had an orgasm at the end, he couldn't tell. He was no match for a man twenty or thirty years younger. But that was understood; no one needed to dwell on that. She'd said not to worry about the birth control-probably on the Pill like most of them. He doubted very much she might have AIDS. All the demographics were wrong. College-educated white woman. And he wasn't going to worry about the little sexual diseases, not at his age, not with all the big possibilities already waiting. What did she want with him? Did she want to be a mother? Breasts and nipples and hips and a soft belly, all waiting. Could he ask her the next time he saw her? No, not yet. You don't just spring that on a woman. But he would see her again, he knew that. Yes, Charlie, you bad boy. Maybe at the Pierre again, maybe somewhere else. He liked her appearance and intelligence. When did you start thinking more about the past than the future? He could live with Ellie another thousand years and she'd never float that question. Because the future scared her. He'd ask Towers, the bow-tied investigator, to find out more about Melissa. No harm in that, just get some basic information.

He slipped his hand around to his back and watched the buildings go by. Something had seized up along the base of his spine, where they'd fused two vertebrae, making him feel the old seams of scar tissue. Something tight or out of alignment, sandpapering the nerves. The doctors had fixed the two worst vertebrae but left a couple of others alone to grind around and disintegrate by themselves. He'd need some kind of medicine, just to walk without looking like he was a hundred years old. Back pain was tricky, part emotional even when the physical malady was obvious. Maybe the tension had contributed-the company, the baby-making business, which now he was convinced he'd been going about in the wrong way. Putting an advertisement in the paper and hiring people to help him-he was staffing an expansion, he was proceeding corporately, for God's sake. Better maybe to find someone he liked, someone young and smart and compatible, and then privately raise the question of a baby. Maybe Melissa Williams might want to have a baby. It wasn't an impossible idea. Why not? You could have an understanding. Everything written down and signed, but based on respect.

Yet life doesn't work that way, he told himself. Life is fuck-ups and plane crashes and your wife acting strange. Having sex with some hot little chick in a room at the Pierre Hotel was not the way to go about making a child. Pleasurable, yes, but not part of an intelligent plan. The wise action at this point would be to forget how much he had enjoyed himself, how sweet and smart she was, and bring whatever further conversation ensued to a graceful close. Maybe one or two more meetings, just so that the ending was not too abrupt. Make sure she did not feel angry or furious. Angry women had a way of being very costly. Better to keep things at arm's length, to continue his plan with Martha and the women who'd written him letters. If she gave him trouble, he would-he didn't know. Pay her to leave him alone, or have a lawyer send a-

Was he as horrible and paranoid as that? Couldn't he have more faith? He had no reason to think she was not just a nice girl who found a bit of comfort being with an older man. A lot of women were like this-they felt safer, better understood, fathered. He had long suspected that Julia had slept with a couple of her professors in college and did not regret it. How wrong was it? Certainly he was never going to leave Ellie. He wondered how she would take it if she knew. Not well.

He shifted miserably in his seat. He'd made matters worse by skipping the night in Hong Kong, deciding instead to bounce north to Shanghai on Tiger Air with no layover. Getting too old for this kind of travel. Dinner that night with Tom Anderson. I'll give him holy hell, Charlie thought. He hoped to stay only three or four days, depending on how severe the problems were. The construction schedule had been fine just three weeks prior. He assumed that someone working for Mr. Ming out of their Shanghai office had already checked on the status of the construction. How much did Ming know? Did he read Marvin Noff's pronouncements?

Bad mood, bad air. The car hummed along toward the Bund, the string of massive European buildings fronting the Huangpu River, where beneath encrustations of neon and television antennas he glimpsed the profile of the great nineteenth-century trading city-the orifice that China had presented so self-exploitatively to the West. Full of Englishmen in bowler hats going about in rickshaws. Opium dens. Chinese girls with cigarette holders and the latest haircuts from Paris. All obliterated by World War II and then the 1949 revolution, after which Shanghai, symbol of Western corruption, was starved by the central government, allowed to rot and rust.

Now all was being rebuilt, to twenty-first-century specifications. Using the same damn bamboo scaffolding techniques that they had practiced for more than a thousand years, erecting splendors long before Europe emerged from the Dark Ages. The wood was extraordinarily strong and light. The Vietnamese had also used it, on bridges, walls, anything. He remembered seeing bamboo scaffolding in reconnaissance photos. Trouble then, trouble now! Here was Teknetrix with a market capitalization of $500 million, embarked on a $52 million construction project that was threatened- imperiled — by the inability to get a few dozen illiterate peasants to string up a pile of long sticks. Insanity! And it wasn't as if the place suffered a shortage of labor, either. Sixty million people lived within a one-hundred-mile radius of Shanghai. Beneath the elevated highway swarmed cabs, bicycles, bicycle rickshaws, motorcycle rickshaws, and trucks piled high with tubing and cement block or bricks. He wished Ellie could see it. She never traveled to China with him anymore. Too dirty and full of disease. She preferred sitting in Italian cathedrals, reading about who painted what mural. Fine, then. Go live in Vista del Muerte.

His unfinished plant lay on the other side of the Huangpu, in the Pudong section, itself a most audacious undertaking, considering that two decades prior nothing had been there. Historically an alluvial flood plain and then a place of fishing shacks and low brick factories, Pudong was now the site of a new financial district, the glass-and-steel fingers there achieving a staggering density meant to rival that of New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, or London. The West was full of doubters about such development in China, that it would ever be done, or done well, or done without great economic dislocation. As if the histories of the United States or Britain or Germany had not been wrenching and destructive. But the only way you made something new was by destroying something old. On the other side of the river, the cab passed the Mori building, China's third tallest, a massive pagoda-roofed rocketship, terrifying in its scale.

"Stop," insisted Charlie. "See big building."

The cabbie proudly flashed his teeth. "Yes, very good. Number one."

Charlie unrolled his window and peered upward; the top of the building was lost in the haze. America doesn't know, he thought bitterly, doesn't want to know. We're too young, too ignorant of history. China's ascendancy was not merely a business cycle or a set of policy changes; no, it was a civilization stirring-again, as China had always stirred again. The recent problems in Asia would be gone within a year or two. Next to the Mori Building rose the World Financial Center, destined to be the tallest building in the world. He remembered two years earlier, when the construction site was merely a muddy field with giant pile drivers hammering steel footings into the mudflats. Now the building was roofed, walled, windowed, and wired, and included a hotel so high up that guests could look out their windows at clear skies, then take the elevator down to the street and walk outside into rain.

And what about his own goddamned little project? He gave the driver the address, and a minute or two later they entered Pudong's manufacturing zone, passing huge buildings marked Kodak, Ericsson, Motorola, Seimens. Here it was, a walled site with a sign announcing in already-faded paint the factory's completion one month hence, a goal now impossible. Lucky to make it in the next three. But don't tell that to Marvin Noff or Mr. Ming.

He asked the driver to wait while he got out. His back! He staggered out of the car in his wrinkled suit and hobbled toward the fenced construction driveway.

"I help you," said the driver, running up to him.

He leaned on the man's arm until they reached the fence. "Thank you," Charlie said. "I appreciate that."

"Very bad back, I think so much," said the driver, pointing.

"Yes," he breathed between spasms. "Will you take me to the friendship store?" Charlie remembered that the department store for foreigners usually had Western over-the-counter remedies for sale. "We can go there and then to the hotel."

"Friendship store closed now," said the driver. "I take you better."

"I'll go to the hotel's doctor."

The driver laughed.

"What's funny?"

"Hotel doctor, many people die."

"I don't believe it."

"Hotel doctor good, traditional Chinese medicine very, very good. Number one."

"You sure?"

"Very, very good, I promise. Medicine very good."

"Okay." He clutched the fence in misery. "I'll try anything."

The driver pulled out his phone and began to chatter in Chinese. Charlie turned to look at his factory, his dream. The building-five windowless stories, thirty thousand square feet on each floor-had progressed minimally since he'd seen it last. Stacks of copper piping and pallets of bricks stood in the same places they had before. No scaffolding. He could see a load of steel, edges starting to rust. Loose trash blew across the site, catching on the locked gate. He gripped its bars, imprisoned from without. But he could see enough to know the trouble he was in; the subcontractors were gone-no electricians, no climate-control people, no plumbers. He'd have to lie to Mr. Ming, fudging the factory's progress reports in order to get the next installment of financing released. Such a fraudulent statement was grounds for termination of the loan. The thing was sinking him. Every day the plant was late getting on-line was a day less of revenue in the second quarter of the next year-a disastrous deficit, what with revenue streams from other products tapering down as they became obsolete or as Manila Telecom stole market share, chewing his feet off. If Marvin Noff knew how behind they were, he'd stick a knife in Teknetrix's stock-urgent sell. I'm getting killed here, Charlie thought, killed big.

"I take you very good medicine," the driver said.

Maybe it's worth it, Charlie thought. I have to be in good form the next few days. A bad back is going to shut me down. He waved his hand. "Let's go."

Ten minutes later they had entered old Shanghai proper, the driver threading the crowded streets, coming so close to the passing waves of bicyclists that Charlie could have reached out a hand and rung the bell on their handlebars with no difficulty. The riders wore bright Western clothes, but some of the older men pedaled by in vintage Mao jackets, as if unconvinced that the political and economic liberalizations of the last decade were permanent. The driver pulled up before a Chinese pharmacy with a male acupuncture mannequin in the window, tiny Chinese characters scattered across it asymmetrically, not a few of them clustered meaningfully around the mannequin's discreetly molded organ of reproduction. Charlie didn't feel hopeful. A few Chinese on the street noted his arrival with interest. The driver helped him inside, past rows of manufactured Chinese medicines, to a counter where an old woman stood mashing something with a mortar and pestle.

The driver addressed her, and she looked at Charlie and asked some questions. The driver turned to Charlie.

"She say how long your back hurt?"

He sighed in discouragement. "A long time."

The driver repeated this to the woman. They spoke. The driver nodded. "How long in days and weeks?"

The woman watched him expectantly, perhaps never having treated a white man before.

"Twenty-seven years," said Charlie. He glanced around the shop. A few Chinese were staring, then they smiled. They came closer.

"Years? You write number."

This he did and the slip of paper ended up in the old woman's gnarled hands. She checked again with the driver.

He nodded as they spoke. "She say do you pass waste easily?"

"Yes."

They spoke. "Do you have pain in heart?"

"No."

The woman nodded. "Do you have clean lungs?"

"Yes."

"Do you have bad dreams?"

"Yes."

"Do you have pain in legs?"

"Yes. But because they were hurt."

"Do you eat fungus?"

"No." I'll ask the hotel for a doctor, he thought. Now four or five Chinese people stood watching, commenting among themselves.

"Do you take any Chinese medicine?"

"No."

"Do you have strong manhood?"

Charlie grimaced. "You mean-do I-"

The driver smiled. "Yes. Is strong or not so strong?"

"Not strong," Charlie said. "Weak."

The answer was repeated. The crowd nodded and hummed privately. The woman did not remove her gaze from Charlie's face. She spoke.

"Is your back ever sing or always cry?"

"Always cry," Charlie said.

"She must see your hands."

The woman held Charlie's hands, rubbing the knuckles, pulling on the fingers. She stared into his eyes and pushed a gray fingernail behind his ear. She looked at his tongue and pressed it with a spoon. This action drew approval from the onlookers, who now numbered at least a dozen, the small children in front. Then she put a piece of paper on her counter and visited many small drawers in her apothecary, dropping in what appeared to be pieces of bark, desiccated sea horses, herbs, dried flowers, pieces of bone or horn, and a number of red and yellow and brown powders. She changed her mind once or twice and returned substances to their containers. She muttered something to the driver.

"She say she must smell."

"Okay."

The woman came around the side of the counter and pressed her nose to Charlie's back.

"She say please let her touch back."

He took off his coat and pulled out his shirt. The gathered people laughed nervously; this was better than their soap operas on television. The old woman lifted up Charlie's shirt without hesitation, and when she saw his scars, she chattered angrily at the driver. She held his shirt up and the crowd talked excitedly.

"What? What?"

"She very mad." The driver grinned in embarrassment. "She say no make very good medicine for you if she never see these bad skins."

The old woman traced the scars with her rough fingers. Then she spoke again.

"She say let down pants, she needs to see."

This was ridiculous. "No," Charlie said in misery.

But she understood his reticence and stared at him, jabbering in Chinese, her face so close he could see her teeth were ground down to brown stumps.

"She say you not honest with her, she want to help you! She say you not like her, you not think she make good medicine, you very insult."

"Let's go to the hotel, for God's sake."

The old woman understood and came up to Charlie, barely reaching his chest, chattering so angrily that he took a step back. She shook her fist as she talked, staring at him fiercely, as if she didn't believe he didn't understand her.

"She say she need to see."

"Right." He glanced at the people in the shop, who now crowded all the way back to the door. They smiled and nodded helpfully. "Can you tell them to go?" he asked the driver.

The driver hollered something in Chinese. No one moved.

"This is pretty embarrassing," said Charlie.

The driver hollered again, but without conviction. More people came into the shop. What could he do? His back throbbed in every position. He could barely stand. He turned his back toward the crowd and provisionally loosened his pants. The old woman came around behind him and without warning yanked them down so that they dropped around his knees. He clutched the elastic of his underwear. "What is she-!"

She pulled his shirttail up and his underwear down and inspected his pale, scarred buttocks, which now hung out sadly for all to see. The crowd murmured loudly. She poked the largest scar and proclaimed something in Chinese at the driver, then yanked up Charlie's underwear.

"She say she make you very good medicine."

He hurriedly pulled up his pants, and the driver helped him with his jacket. The old woman returned to her concoction and subtracted and added several items, looking up at Charlie repeatedly like a quick-draw street portraitist. Then she mashed up the items into a rough powder, picked out a few extraneous bits of matter, blew softly on the pile, funneled the paper into a square envelope, sealed it, scrawled some Chinese characters on it, and handed it to Charlie. The crowd hummed its approval.

"This is a tea. You drink morning and night. Five days," the driver said.

"I pour a little into hot water?"

"Drink water, drink medicine, drink every bit."

He sniffed the envelope. It was foul. Probably poison. "What's this called?"

The driver asked the woman. She answered without looking up as she cleaned her counter.

"Spring bamboo," said the driver.

The Peace Hotel, a gloomy Art Deco pile, sat on the other side of the river. Outside the hotel, cabs and bicyclists streamed along Zhongshan Road, and money changers clustered furtively on the corners. Women selling postcards badgered anyone who looked foreign. A half dozen of the city's million-odd construction workers slumped together in an alleyway, sleeping off their night shift, peasant boys from the far provinces who owned not much more than their tools, boys already hardened by labor and impossibly outclassed by the desirous young Shanghai girls with their American makeup and Japanese cell phones. The cab driver carried his bags inside the hotel.

In his room, he ordered hot water to be delivered, and when it came, he spooned some of the old woman's powder into a cup, poured in the hot water, stirred it, dumped in some sugar, drank it off in three horrid gulps, then lay down on the bed with the phone. It was 6:00 p.m. in Shanghai, 6:00 a.m. in New York. Too early for Towers, the investigator, to be in his office. He dialed anyway.

The call was answered. "Towers? Charlie Ravich. I was going to leave a message."

"I get in early. We're finishing that report on the three women."

Including Pamela Archer, the woman who lived on the farm, whom he had not finished interviewing because of Tom Anderson's phone call. "Right," Charlie said.

"We'll have that today. Sent to you."

"Fine," he answered, not particularly interested. "Wait, don't send it to my office. Send it to me here."

"Okay."

"I have one more name I need you to check out."

"Lay it on me."

"Melissa Williams. Lives in the city. Downtown, I think. In her mid-twenties, educated."

"You don't have a Social Security number, I suppose."

"No."

"It's okay. We can get it in about a minute. What about her appearance?"

"White, slender, dark hair, maybe five seven."

"Okay."

He got up off the bed and stood at the window. Across the river glittered the lights of Pudong. "How fast can you get back to me on her?"

"I can have some information tomorrow. Won't be much."

"I understand."

"Anything else?" asked Towers.

"Yes, for God's sake, don't tell Martha about this last name."

"Technically I'm retained by her."

"Not on this one," Charlie said. "Bill me directly."

"You want to pay?"

"I want to pay."

He said goodbye, caught up on CNN's baseball scores from the night before, then rose to go downstairs to meet Tom Anderson in the hotel's French restaurant. In the elevator he tested his back. Maybe better. Anderson, a fleshy kid of thirty-five wearing a good suit, was waiting for him, and pumped Charlie's hand confidently. "Great to see you, Mr. Ravich."

"I'm in a hell of a bad mood, Tom."

"Yeah, I guess."

"I'm not on the other side of the world," Charlie went on as they sat down. "You think I am, but I'm not. I will hound you until you get this thing built, Tom. I will call your bosses and tell them what a completely shitty job you are doing. Your company has bids in on five other telecom factory construction jobs in Asia, Tom. They're not direct competitors of ours. I know the CEOs of three of those companies personally. In twenty minutes I can call each of them. A lot of people have put a lot of trust in you, Tom, though I don't know why. Now you need to pull something out of a hat. You need to fix a broken situation. Or I'll hire someone else. It'll cost more but might put us back on schedule. It'll also mean that we will sue your company to recover those extra costs." He paused, wondering what effect this had. "You're understanding me now, yes?"

"Yes."

They sat. The Chinese waitresses, edgy as sparrows in their silk uniforms, stayed back. Anderson smoked his cigarette down to the filter. Charlie watched him. Same age Ben would have been. He waited a few minutes more, just to let the kid's suffering ripen, and then he said, "Listen, I have a feeling I know what's happening."

Anderson looked up. "You do?"

"You've been in Shanghai what, six months, a year?"

Anderson nodded miserably. "Ten months."

"It's screwing you up?"

"Yes."

"But it's not the heat and the language and the crowding and the noise, though those things are all pretty bad."

"No."

"What's that street with all the expat bars?" Charlie had been there-the places were full of Germans and Australians and Americans, three or four beautiful Chinese girls for every Westerner. "You're having a little problem with the local culture?"

Anderson nodded.

"You're married with young kids back home?"

"Yes."

"But the Chinese women are-"

"Everywhere," Anderson interrupted. "Westerners are still rich by their standards."

"Your company doesn't have a policy about Chinese guests in company apartments?"

Anderson waved his hand. "I rented my own apartment."

"How many girls do you have in there?"

Anderson hung his head. "Three."

"Cooking, cleaning, and everything else," Charlie said. He remembered some of the American pilots in Thailand. Every few months one of the men would have a problem. Sometimes they thought it was love. Sometimes it was. "You're tired all the time, you're distracted, you hear the girls talking and you don't know what they're saying, whether they are laughing at you or not, you worry your money is being stolen, you're drinking too much."

"Yes." Anderson looked up. "How do you know?"

Charlie shrugged. "Doesn't matter. What does matter is that I don't care. I have no sympathy. I can't. I have too many people depending on me. You either deliver or you're gone. You can be living on a sampan and smoking opium for all I care. You're at the corporate level now, Tom. Either you deliver or you're dead."

They sat in silence.

"Now," Charlie finally said, "tell me how to fix it."

Relieved, Anderson unburdened himself of the site's problems. It was true, he admitted, that he had made some scheduling errors, which had slowed things down a bit, but there was time built into the schedule to catch up, especially since the Chinese were willing to work at night, if you paid them. The problem really did rest with the scaffolding company. As if they liked to cause problems. They wanted to renegotiate their contract because they said their costs were higher than expected. Normally the municipality would handle this, but the municipality was run by the cousin of the man who ran the scaffolding contracts, and he was unwilling to stand firm against the company's request for more money. Anderson had recalculated their bid and compared it to comparable recent jobs he knew about, and as far as he could see, the scaffolding company men were blowing smoke, trying to jack up their price. In effect, then, the scaffolding company was standing with its hand out, waiting to be paid. They would not talk to Anderson; he was not senior enough. In fact, he had accidentally insulted the scaffolding company's president, Mr. Lo, by suggesting that Mr. Lo negotiate with him directly. The last conversation had been tense and unproductive. But now Mr. Lo knew Charlie was coming, and Anderson had taken the liberty of scheduling an appointment with him for the next morning.

"Good," said Charlie, wondering how he would convince Mr. Lo to resume labor. Foreign companies usually employed a Chinese go-between, an expeditor hired as a consultant, who massaged difficult situations and presented bills that were never itemized. "Is Lo reasonable?" he asked.

"I don't think so," Anderson answered, and Charlie thought about this response, how much it might cost, how valuable it was.

The Peace Hotel was famous for its band of old musicians who played American jazz and show tunes each night. The men, most past sixty, had been so terrified by the excesses of the Cultural Revolution that they'd buried their trumpets and cellos and drums underground. Now, redeemed by history, they played "Moon River," "Besame Mucho," and other mid-century standards from a song sheet each night to adoring American and German tourists in the hotel. Charlie sat and watched them, sipping a drink, reading the International Herald Tribune page by page, and picking at a piece of chocolate cake.

His back felt pretty good, so he didn't mind sitting in a chair and making some calls. He moved to a quieter table in the rear and had the waiter bring him a regular phone. I'm going to have to play a little dirty, he thought. Thank goodness the board of directors goes along with everything I tell them. Retired second-tier executives, handpicked for their sleepy compliance. If Manila Telecom wanted to try to buy Teknetrix, then he was going to make it as expensive as possible. He dialed the company's headquarters and told Karen to hold a line open for him. Then, in sequence, he ordered the investors' relations office to announce that Teknetrix was repurchasing some of its stock-always a good sign for investors-and that the company would soon begin production of the Q4 multiport switch in the new factory in Shanghai. "Big press release," he said. "Tomorrow." Never mind that the company hadn't yet engineered the Q4's manufacturing sequence or finalized factory management or secured agreements for raw materials. The news would ping into business wire services, Internet investor sites, and Mr. Ming's brain. Next he told the R amp;D people that the Q4 needed to be ready sooner. They'd have to ramp up the manufacturing design to catch up with the product design. They could squeeze out the final manufacturing efficiencies over the next six months, after they'd started gaining market share and cash flow. In fact, he was willing to absorb a narrow profit margin to protect the perception of the company. Manila Telecom would look behind the curve. What next? "Give me sales, Karen." He told the sales division to book some third-quarter orders into the second-quarter profits they were about to announce-the auditors could correct the numbers later, more or less within statutory requirements.

"Any calls?" he asked Karen when she came back on the phone.

"None that are important," she said.

His head was full of Teknetrix details, but there were other things he needed to remember. "I might get a call from someone named Melissa Williams."

"No one by that name has called," said Karen.

"Fine." As they'd agreed.

"You sound really good, Charlie."

"I am."

Next he called Jane in London.

"Charlie!"

"Just caught you."

"Yes. I haven't spoken to you in weeks."

"Did you get that car?" he asked.

"No, I can't do that."

"If you say so."

"You have another play?"

"No," he answered. "I want you to transfer those GT proceeds to my private banker in New York."

"That's Ted Fullman at Citibank?"

"You got it."

"All or some?" Jane asked.

"All."

"It'll be there in an hour. You seem kind of up, Charlie."

On top here, he told himself, in the game. Eight million after-tax from a dead man's mouth, sex with a twenty-seven-year-old woman, and I'm drinking tea made out of sea horses.

Next he called Fullman, who was excited to hear that sixteen million dollars were arriving in Charlie's account. "What am I doing with this huge nugget, Charlie?"

"Two things, Ted. First, wire half to my accountant. The capital gains on this are all short-term. Now, with the remaining half I want to buy my wife a house."

"You want me to handle that?"

Always helpful, the private banker. "Yes, as a matter of fact. It's a retirement community in Princeton called Vista del Mar. Even though the ocean is nowhere near. Ellie has a deposit down on a property. Please call them up and get the balance and just close on it. It'll be a million or two. You have that power of attorney still."

"If it's a cash deal, this can go quickly."

"I'd like to surprise her."

"That's a hell of a gift, Charlie."

"Yeah."

"You must love her to pieces."

"Daddy?" came Julia's voice early the next morning. He had a headache upon waking and immediately wanted some of the odorous tea. "There's something wrong with Mom. Somehow she got past the elevator man and tried to hail a cab in her bathrobe."

"What?"

"She was standing out there with a little suitcase."

"Where was she going?"

"I don't know. The doorman brought her back inside and called me and I ran up there and we went straight to Dr. Berger's. He looked at her right away and gave her some anxiety medication and said she shouldn't be left alone tonight. I brought her to our place."

"Can I talk to her?"

"She's sleeping in the guest room. I don't think I should wake her, Dad."

"What does he think is wrong with her?"

"He can't tell yet. She's anxious. I know she's been thinking about Ben a lot…" Julia sighed at the sadness of it. "She's been taking too many sleeping pills, but she also has indications… They got her to sleep-basically knocked her out-and will do some blood work. Dr. Berger has some blood results from a year ago, and tomorrow they're going to test the protein deposits in her blood and see if there's a change. They can make some guess about how fast it's going."

"How fast what is going?"

"Alzheimer's."

"I really don't-"

"Don't fool yourself, Dad. Mom isn't the same as she was a couple of months ago."

"She was clever enough to buy a retirement home in New Jersey without me knowing about it," he responded. "Seems like someone who is thinking all right."

"You've just proved my point." Julia, ever the lawyer, slicing his logic into piles and rearranging it into her own truth. "Yes, a month or so ago she was able to do that, though of course they're very good at walking older people through this process, and now, now, she is hailing cabs in nothing but a bathrobe!"

"Okay," he said.

"She had lipstick on, too."

"What does that matter?"

"It explains a lot — oh, you wouldn't understand."

"Try me, dammit."

"It's just so heartbreaking."

"The lipstick?"

"Yes! It shows she thought she was fine, she thought she was ready to go out, that she wanted to go out."

"Where was she going?"

"By the time we got to Dr. Berger's, she was sort of tired and hostile, so she didn't say much, but I think she was trying to go to you."

"Me?" He staggered out of bed and found the packet of tea.

"She said she was going to China."

"Why?"

"I don't know. I couldn't understand it. She said some papers came messengered to you at home and she opened them and thought you needed them."

"What papers?"

"I don't know. I haven't been up to your apartment yet."

The report from Towers, the investigator? What else could it be? I meant send it to me here, Charlie thought, didn't I say that? What else could upset Ellie so much? She would have picked the pages off the front table by the elevator, Lionel going up and down in his circular window, and opened it, thinking perhaps it was urgent, since it had been messengered, and, reading it, gotten the shock of a lifetime.

"Are you going back to the apartment?" he asked Julia anxiously, dumping some of the dry tea into a glass of cold water. Maybe it had opium or cocaine or something in it, but he had to have it now.

"In about an hour, yes, to get her sleeping gown and stuff. The doctor expects her to sleep for about ten or twelve hours. She'll feel more comfortable if she has her usual things."

"Right," he groaned. He looked at the concoction. It had dry bits floating on top. Why did he crave it so much? He jolted the whole glass of thick brown liquid down his throat.

"What?"

"Nothing."

"You sounded funny."

"I was drinking something, sweetie." Julie would prowl through the apartment looking for clues to her mother's mental condition. If Ellie had left the investigator's report out, Julia would find it.

"Daddy?"

"Yes."

"Can you come home right away?"

He'd have to figure out how to accelerate negotiations with Mr. Lo. "I think I can take a plane tomorrow, sweetie."

"How's your back?"

"Amazing."

"I don't understand."

"I got some Chinese medicine. They made it right in front of me. Really quite-"

"Dad?" Julia said suddenly. "I have someone on the other line. I'll expect you home in about forty-eight hours?"

"Yes." He thought of the investigator's papers lying on the kitchen counter or wherever Ellie opened them. "Mom'll be at your place tonight?"

"I think so."

"Maybe she should stay a night or two."

"I can't. Brian is in L.A. until next week, and I'm leaving for London tomorrow."

"So," Charlie asked, his mind flying in front of the conversation, "Mom'll get back into our apartment sometime tomorrow morning or afternoon?"

"Morning. I mean, she's got pills that should calm her."

Not if she reads the investigator's report again, he told himself. "Tell her not to worry about anything and that I'm coming home."

He retrieved Towers's number and then stood in front of the bathroom mirror. He took off his shirt, looked at his stomach. A horror. Like his father's twenty years ago. Melissa Williams must have been out of her mind. He sat down on the toilet thinking that he was starting to smell Chinese to himself. Happened on every trip.

He called Towers. "You sent me a package?"

"You got it? Good."

"I'm in China," Charlie told him bitterly.

"I don't understand," said Towers. "You called me at six o'clock this morning, said send it to me, but not at the office."

"Yeah," said Charlie. "I did."

"I'm terribly sorry, Mr. Ravich."

"Me too. What was in it?"

"Just the usual basic information."

"Yeah?"

"Also, I'm getting some good stuff on that Melissa Williams."

For a moment Charlie considered telling Towers to forget about Melissa Williams. Maybe that would be better. But he was curious about her. "Do me a favor," he finally said.

"Sure."

"Don't write any of it down, goddammit. Nothing, not a report or a fax or anything."

"I'll have my handwritten notes."

"Just read them to me and throw them away."

"When?"

He looked at his watch. His headache was going away. He had the meeting with Lo. "Call me at the end of the day. My day. Five p.m."

"That's 5:00 a.m. here."

"Yes," said Charlie in a cold voice.

"Right," answered Towers. "I'll call. I'm terribly sorry about the mix-up."

The tea was working now, helping him think. He wanted to know what Towers's report said, but even more than that, he wanted to get it out of the apartment before Julia arrived. Ellie sounded as if she'd been pretty addled by the time she got to the doctor's, but Julia wouldn't forget a comma. He called the front desk of their building. "This is Charlie Ravich."

"Evening, Mr. Ravich," came the voice of Kelly, the doorman.

Not where I am, he thought. "Listen, is Lionel on duty yet?"

"Just got on."

"Can you switch me to the phone in the elevator? I need to ask him a small favor."

"Very good, Mr. Ravich."

The phone clicked. "Lionel here."

"Lionel, this is Charlie Ravich."

"Mr. Ravich, sir."

"I need a favor, Lionel."

"Sure thing."

"Take the elevator to my floor, please."

"Right away."

Charlie could hear the far hum of the elevator. The elevator stopped and the static with it. "Sir?"

"Lionel, you see the umbrella stand in the corner?"

"Yes."

"There's a key under it."

"You want me to leave my elevator?"

"Yes. Just for a moment."

"I never leave my elevator, sir."

"I realize that. It's a big favor."

"Highly unusual."

"Life is unusual, Lionel. That's why we never know what's going to happen next."

"Yes, sir. But I try to avoid unusual things."

"You need to do this now."

"Mrs. Rosen usually comes down this time."

"Just park the elevator and get the key."

The line was silent. "Okay."

"Here's what I want you to do. Open the front door and look in the dining room and the kitchen for an envelope or a business letter marked with the name of a law firm."

"What do you want me to do with it?"

"Find it first."

Charlie heard the creak of the elevator cage. Then, perhaps, the sound of a door being opened. Then nothing. He was listening to silence being bounced through a satellite. Lionel was probably tiptoeing through the apartment, ogling all of the antique furniture Ellie had bought over the years.

"I'm back."

"Yes?"

"I didn't find anything."

"Please look again. Go into any room. It's probably a few pages and an envelope. Probably opened, too. It was messengered."

"I'll go back."

He heard Lionel walk away.

"I have it," he said. "A letter from a Mr. Towers. Right inside the door."

"Opened?"

"Yes."

"Please read it to me."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. I want you to read it to me and then-"

"Excuse me. Yes?" Lionel was speaking into the elevator's intercom. "She's waiting? I'll get her. I have to go now, Mr. Ravich."

"No, hang on, Lionel, I don't want to break the connection. Leave the phone off the hook."

"It'll be a few minutes."

"I don't care. I'm calling from China. I don't want to risk losing the connection."

"Yes, sir."

Charlie heard the elevator hum upward to the twelfth floor.

"Evening, Mrs. Rosen," came Lionel's echoey voice.

"Lionel, I was waiting almost ten minutes."

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Rosen."

"They said you would be right up."

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Rosen. I-"

"Whatever the reason, surely you could have had them call me and tell me you would be late… That's my only bag."

"Yes, ma'am."

"You know my late husband moved us into this building in 1947. That's more than half a century my family's been in this apartment building. We could have gone other places, we had the money. Some of the other buildings even asked us if we wanted to buy in. We could have done that. We talked about it. Three blocks up they wanted us very badly. But we said no. We said we would put up with the bad elevators and the other problems. The quality of the people changed and we stayed very open-minded."

"Yes, Mrs. Rosen."

"The other buildings very much wanted Mort to buy in," she went on. "He was respected by all of them. They knew his money going into a new place would make people feel comfortable. They knew that if Mort Rosen bought in, then it was solid, it was the gold standard."

"Yes, Mrs. Rosen."

"He was very respected."

"Yes, Mrs. Rosen. Here's the lobby."

The elevator door creaked again.

"Yes, Mr. Ravich. I left the letter upstairs."

"Okay, let's go to it, Lionel."

At the eighth floor, Lionel disappeared from the phone again. "I have it," he said when he came back. "Two pages."

"I want you to read it to me."

"Read it to you?"

"Yes."

"It's not short."

"I'm waiting."

"'Dear Mr. Ravich,'" Lionel began. "Can you hear me okay?"

"Yes."

"'Purse-purse-'"

"Purse?"

"'Purs u ant to your wreck, your wreck-est-'"

"My request?"

"Yes. '-we have compiled an… an anal — '"

" Anal? "

"'Anal-sis-'"

"Analysis," said Charlie.

"'-of the three women you speck, speck-'"

"Speck?"

"'Speck- fied. Each has strengths and weaknesses. Two, we believe, are supper-superior candies to bear you a child, based on persons-personals, family, educational, and financial histories. Both of these candies-candy- dates report that they are eager to-'"

"Okay," Charlie interrupted. "Stop."

"Stop?" Lionel asked.

"Yes." He'd heard enough. "Please destroy it. Please throw that letter down the garbage chute."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. Do it now."

"Absolutely."

A pause, a muffled bang. "Did you do it?"

"Yes. Done."

"Forgotten?"

"Forever, Mr. Ravich."

"Thank you, Lionel."

"Goodbye, Mr. Ravich!"

"Hello, Mr. Ravich!" exclaimed Mr. Lo, waving for Charlie to sit in a deep chair with doilies on the arms, the traditional Chinese meeting chair. He and Tom Anderson had arrived at the scaffolding company's offices-new but so poorly constructed as to already seem decades old-and been greeted in the lobby by a trio of Mr. Lo's sons, three skinny men with bad teeth who spoke almost no English.

Charlie sat next to Mr. Lo and accepted a cup of green tea. He looked around in disgust. The chairs were old and soiled, the room barely ventilated. Had Conroy been in the city, this never would have happened. The fact that he was even having the meeting at all testified to Tom Anderson's youth and incompetence. This was a small company that had somehow ended up being the scaffolding subcontractor for the Teknetrix factory. For all he knew, they were in over their heads. Clearly they'd underestimated his status and he had overestimated theirs. Mr. Lo wore a suit, but also had rough hands; he was still out there on the job, his interaction with Western businessmen limited. I'm dealing with a low-level guy here, Charlie thought, the equivalent of a subcontractor from Queens. They've reverted to the traditional Chinese meeting because they don't know how to do it any other way.

A terrified young woman was introduced as the translator, and she sat next to Mr. Lo, who spoke in lengthy pronouncements at the far wall of the meeting room, where his three sons sat studying Charlie's expression. Suddenly he was hearing more about the bamboo scaffolding business than he thought possible. How the bamboo was planted and grown and harvested, selected for its width and cut to ten-foot lengths and tied with thousands of little ribbons, the knots of which were secrets of the trade, passed from master to student. This won't work, he thought to himself, it's too decorous. I need a situation in which I can negotiate. They were feeling him out as much as he was them. The sons had prepared a slide-show presentation, and now Mr. Lo produced a laser-pointer from his pocket and made what were no doubt very interesting observations as the red pin light of the laser jerked across crisp color shots of Mr. Lo's men erecting capacious scaffolding projects, Mr. Lo supervising same, Mr. Lo at the top of a twenty-story scaffold structure, Mr. Lo's sons in hard hats conferring solemnly, the original Lo patriarch, bamboo wise man, a wizened figure in a traditional conical hat, Mr. Lo's sons cutting lengths of plastic knotting twine…

It was enough to make Charlie want to plunge Mr. Lo's pointer into his eye. Tom Anderson squirmed unhappily, sensing Charlie's irritation. He needed the expeditious solution, the move across the board, the air strike. I'll be rude, Charlie thought. He looked at his watch. They didn't notice. He bent his head, looked at his watch, and counted to fifteen slowly.

Mr. Lo said something sharply. The slide show stopped.

Charlie looked up. Mr. Lo smiled. The sons smiled. The tea-girl smiled.

"Mr. Lo's description," Charlie announced authoritatively, filling the room with his voice, "of his family's very distinguished… bamboo scaffolding company… has been most informative." He nodded gravely at the translator. "Please tell him… I understand… what he is saying."

When Mr. Lo heard his name, his eyes creased with pleasure.

"Please tell him… that I feel that my company… has not shown enough appreciation…" Charlie watched Mr. Lo blink. "For the history and importance… of his very distinguished company

… and for the excellent management he provides."

The translator relayed the statement. Mr. Lo beamed.

"Please tell Mr. Lo… that I would take it as a great and important honor… if he would be my private guest… for dinner tonight… at the Phoenix-Dragon restaurant… in the Peace Hotel."

The translator said, "Mr. Lo please to meet you. He say perhaps six o'clock is very good."

Charlie stood and shook hands.

The translator added, "Mr. Lo asks if you are needing me to translate your dinner talking."

Charlie looked at Mr. Lo. "No," he said softly, keeping his eyes on Lo. "Just the two of us."

At five o'clock he was sitting on his hotel bed watching CNN's football commentators hype the coming Sunday NFL games. How many touchdowns can a man watch? wondered Charlie. The phone rang. "Okay," Towers began in a tired voice, "I've done what can be done in a day. No more, but certainly no less."

"Tell me."

"Melissa Williams is twenty-seven years old," he began. "She lives on East Fourth Street. She works at SharkByteMediaNet, Inc. That's what it's called. This is a very successful design firm specializing in Internet Web sites. They have offices at Broadway and Prince. She has no criminal record, no outstanding liens or traffic tickets. Her New York driver's license indicates that she wears corrective lenses. She has a perfect credit record." Towers paused, presumably to consult his notes. "I estimate her income at thirty-eight thousand dollars a year, based on her credit record. People of her age and education tend to carry predictable percentages of income as consumer debt. Her social security number was issued in the State of Washington, and a national directory search for a name match suggests she once lived in Seattle. We ran an Internet search and found out that she graduated summa cum laude from Carleton College in Minnesota. That's a good school."

"What else?" he asked. None of Tower's information seemed very specific.

"She's never been married-in New York State, at least. She has an inactive bank account in Seattle, and an old car loan there co-signed by a John J. Williams. A professional directory search of the Seattle area reveals that there's a fifty-two-year-old corporate lawyer named John J. Williams, who is probably her father. He's locally prominent, owns a house on Bainbridge Island he bought three years ago for eight hundred and twenty thousand dollars. A family member, John Jr., probably a younger brother, has a record of minor drug and traffic offenses." Towers took a breath. This is more like it, Charlie thought. "We have a confidential source in the Red Cross who says that Melissa Williams successfully donated blood earlier this year, which means she passed all of their screening tests for HIV, hepatitis, and so on. Our contact in the medical insurance information company that we consult with says she's had routine medical check-ups and care for the last few years in New York. That's what we've been able to find today."

"Pretty damn good," Charlie said, standing to test his back. It felt warm, loose. "Reading between the lines?"

"A good kid, I'd say. Clean-living, works, pays her bills, gets regular check-ups, comes from a stable family in a good part of the country. The younger brother is the screw-up, not her. That's my gut on this."

The fuckers always spoke more English than they let on. Mr. Lo's blink at the word appreciation. He and Mr. Lo drank and ate silently, the sweat creeping down Charlie's back as he considered how to do this. Not in the room, not in the restaurant, not next to the river walking along the Bund, where they could be followed or observed.

"Let's go outside," Charlie suggested after he had signed the check. He checked his watch. Seven p.m., which meant Ellie was just waking up in Julia's apartment.

They took the elevator down without speaking, then passed through the revolving door. Charlie turned to Lo. "A taxi?"

"No, no," answered Lo. "You see."

They walked a block away from the hotel through the carbon-choked dusk. Motorcycle rickshaws puttered by. Lo looked at Charlie and he nodded. Lo signaled one of the rickshaws and said something to the driver. Then they got in, Charlie first, his greater weight sinking the three-wheeled vehicle on his side. The rickshaw clattered forward through the bicycles and other traffic; exhaust fumes filled Charlie's lungs. But, amazingly enough, sitting in the noisy, cramped space didn't hurt his back. Mr. Lo pulled the curtain shut, and so it was just the two of them.

"Okay," Charlie said. "How much?"

Lo pulled out a calculator. No one could overhear, no one could see. Nothing was on paper. Lo punched in the number 70,000.

"Dollars?" Charlie said.

Lo nodded.

Charlie took the calculator and punched in 30,000.

"No, no, no." Lo waved his hand. "Much appreciation, okay?" He punched in 55,000.

Charlie took the calculator, stared at the sum. Against what was being leveraged here-Teknetrix's market capitalization, Ming's $52 million, Ellie's mental condition-the amount was infinitesimal. Gumball money. The rickshaw lurched back and forth. Lo's face watched impassively. "I want the job done fast," Charlie said finally. "You understand?"

"Yes, number one."

"No fuck-ups."

"Yes."

"You understand the word fuck-ups?"

"Fuck-ups. Fuck- ups." Lo smiled. "Very bad."

"Yes. You are a strong man," Charlie said.

"I think you are very strong. Too much strong for me."

"No, no." Give him face, Charlie thought. This is what he wants from the gweilo, along with the cash. "I pay you thirty thousand now and twenty-five thousand when the job is done. Six weeks."

"No, no."

"What, then?"

Lo punched in 40,000. "Now. So we can do very number-one job." Then he cleared the calculator and punched in 15,000. "Six weeks. U.S. dollar."

Charlie looked at Lo's face. Old enough to have been a soldier thirty years prior. The Chinese military had helped North Vietnam with almost everything. Much scaffolding required, of course, ha-ha. He held out his hand. "Forty thousand U.S. now. Fifteen thousand in six weeks, when the job is done."

Lo shook his hand vigorously. "Yes, good."

Twenty envelopes rested in his coat pockets, each with five thousand dollars inside. The manager at the Peace Hotel had nodded at Charlie's request for cash, and merely added the funds and a small fee to the hotel bill. Charlie pulled out eight of the envelopes and handed them to Lo. In the dimness, Lo glanced into each, counting the hundred-dollar bills with a brisk flicking of his fingers that suggested he'd handled quite a bit of yuan in his time. No one on the street could see, and the driver was busy in the noise of the traffic. "Good," exclaimed Lo. "Six weeks. Job finished very good."

Charlie nodded.

Lo slipped the envelopes into his coat and hollered at the driver, who pulled over. Without a backward look at Charlie, Lo leapt into the street, disappearing quickly into the crowds. A Chinese among Chinese. Impossible to follow, gone. The motorcycle rickshaw jolted forward into the chaos of traffic, and already it was so dark that the men squatting in the street repairing bicycle tires next to the filth that ran in the gutters did not see the American businessman jangling through Shanghai's gloom. Okay, Ellie, he thought, I'm coming home, fast as I can.